Welcome to the Hog Blog, a blog chronicling minor-league baseball in the Lehigh Valley. Tom Housenick, The Morning Call's IronPigs beat writer, has been at The Morning Call since 2008. In a previous lifetime, he was at Lackawanna County Stadium in Moosic talking with future Phillies Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard, among many others.
He’ll now be spending his summers in search of who the Phillies are hoping to be the next Chase Utley and Cole Hamels plus any outfielder who catch and hit. What he really hopes to find are the next Mariano Rivera, Todd Helton and Jim Thome --- great human beings who happened to be great at this sport.
He spent the last five years covering Colonial League football, college basketball and high school track & field.

After a somewhat pessimistic outlook earlier this morning, it looks as if they're anticipating a weather window to get some baseball in here at Alliance Bank Stadium this afternoon.

The grounds crew pulled the tarp back enough to manicure the mound and the home plate area a few minutes ago, and although the tarp remains on the field, they appear to have gotten things ready for a quick tarp pull on short notice if necessary.

UPDATE: The trap is being pulled and a media rep from the Chiefs just said they are planning for an on-time start. ...

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Mike Harrington from the Buffalo News says the current situation with Gwinnett and the IronPigs reminds him of the 1998 Northern Division race between the Bisons and Syracuse.

Buffalo took a half-game lead on the Chiefs on Sunday night when Jeff Manto hit a three-run home run in the ninth for an 8-7 win at Scranton, then won the division when rain wiped out the Bisons game at Scranton and Syracuse's home game with Ottawa on Labor Day. The Chiefs still made the playoffs as the wild card but the storm, Harrington said in an e-mail, was so violent it knocked out power at Syracuse, forcing the league to flip-flop the home sites of the semifinals.

The series never came to Syracuse, however, since Buffalo swept the first three games and went on to beat Durham in the finals.

It was Buffalo's first season in the International League after the demise of the old American Association, and the Bisons had hired a Scranton-area viographer to film Sunday's game to capture what they hoped would be pennant-winning highlights. Instead, the game was cancelled, and since the Scranton TV stations had left by the ninth inning (and then Lackawanna County Multipurpose Stadium didn't have any in-house camera network back then), Buffalo also had no footage of Manto's dramatic homer the night before, either.